Situation After more than 50 years of business expansion, MECO needed to update systems. Deliveries were documented on paper and entered into a 16-year-old System 21. There were five data centers that used different systems

I am downloading email using Fetchmail from gmail and another ISP using POP and IMAP. I have been successful however it is downloading ALL email from the account into the specified account. I would like it to start downloading the email from a starting point or ignore from a specified date. Is there a way to do this?

fetchmail will get all email and then (as an option) flush the queue of seen messages. Once it's done the initial fetch it will continue to work on new messages, but there's no 'since' feature having a quick look at the docs.

What the problem you are trying to solve, perhaps there's a better tool.

2 Replies

fetchmail will get all email and then (as an option) flush the queue of seen messages. Once it's done the initial fetch it will continue to work on new messages, but there's no 'since' feature having a quick look at the docs.

What the problem you are trying to solve, perhaps there's a better tool.

1st Post

Hi there,

I'm just including this note here for anyone else having the same issue.

The context here is that I was using a gmail account, then migrated to a new gmail account. The gmail data migration tool imported my full message history, and I use fetchmail to pop mail off to read using mutt or alpine on a linux server.

Obviously I didn't want to redownload my full history from my new gmail account, so the way I resolved this is using the -l parameter which does not download messages over a certain size. I just added:

-l 1

to the parameters so my command looks like:

fetchmail -d 5 -l 1

note that's a lower case L note an upper case i.

What this means is that it will go through the full history ignoring all messages because every message is bigger than 1 octet. Once it has finished, I will remove the -l 1 parameter.

This means that will miss downloading any messages that arrive during this time, but I couldn't find a better way of achieving this.